How to Avoid Bad Movies

Vlog

This post is available as a vlog. I’m told nobody reads anymore, but that people have infinite patience for talking heads on screens. That being the case, you may as well gather up the family, kick back, and launch the video. If, on the other hand, you’re old school, the text is still here, along with original art by my daughter.

Introduction

Okay, we’re into our eighth month of shelter-in-place and we’re running out of movies. We’ve seen the Oscar nominees and all the films friends have recommended and, it seems, are down to the dregs. It’s bad enough wasting time on a movie that ends up being lame, but now we’re spending half an hour researching what to watch and still coming up short.

In this post I’ll give you fresh guidelines on how to dodge bad movies. I’ll also provide a list of ten critics who should be banned for life, and why. Along the way you’ll get critiques of five awful movies that critics loved … not just to warn you away, but to examine how highly acclaimed movies can be so bad. Finally, I’ll provide a list of the twenty best movies I’ve seen in the last few years, just to end on a positive note.

Can’t we just follow the star ratings?

It’s common practice to vet movies by looking at their IMDb user ratings and/or Metacritic scores. I’m only halfway on board with this. I know I can’t trust my fellow man, because Avengers: Infinity War has an average IMDb user rating of 8.4. Meanwhile, no fewer than a dozen sequels have been made to The Fast and the Furious, so it’s obvious the unwashed masses are just pushovers.

The professionals ought to do better. For many months I’ve been choosing movies based largely on Metascore, that being the averaged ratings from (supposedly) “the world’s most respected critics.” To some degree, this works, as I’ve been warned off of countless movies that look good on paper, like Everything Is Illuminated (which scored only 58 points though the novel on which it’s based is fantastic) and Step Brothers (a mere 51, despite Rolling Stone naming it the 17th funniest movie of all time).

While Metascores do seem capable of outing bad movies, they’re far from totally reliable. I keep sitting through awful movies that have sky-high average scores. Multiple critics will give some film a perfect 100 and it’ll not just be meh, but actually totally lame. It seems that when a movie—especially a very serious one—tries really hard but crashes and burns, it’s almost guaranteed to be highly praised by critics anyway. I have a theory: when the plot and the point of a movie are totally unfathomable, a certain type of highbrow critic will want to rave about it, perhaps hoping to seem far more sophisticated and perceptive than his readership.

Last Year at Marienbad, though it’s too old to have a Metascore ranking, exemplifies the kind of relentlessly highfalutin movie that gets elite critics all hot and bothered. And yet, it completely sucks. The two main characters are annoying and unrealistic, their romance completely unconvincing and tedious, the dialogue maddeningly obtuse. Original? Perhaps. Watchable? I want that 94 minutes of my life back. (I fact-checked the length and it’s a good thing … I’d have guessed it was at least three hours long.) And yet critics adored this movie (or pretended to).

Check out the little video homage Richard Brody (the sometime New Yorker critic) pays to Last Year at Marienbad here. If you can’t help but roll your eyes at the film footage, and Brody’s bloviating about it, then you’ll understand what I’m talking about … the hyper-intellectual over-the-top highbrow nonsense so many critics indulge in. Even the mainstream critic Roger Ebert wrote, I kid you not, in his (retrospective) review of Marienbad, “I sipped my coffee and nodded thoughtfully.” It wasn’t enough that he liked the movie … he wanted us to actually picture him discussing the movie with a fellow intellectual, so we can appreciate how elevated their discourse was.

This weirdness can be explained in terms of mimetic theory. In her great book The Possessed, Elif Batuman, citing René Girard, the father of mimetic theory, describes it thus:

According to Girard, there is in fact no such thing as human autonomy or authenticity. All of the desires that direct our actions in life are learned or imitated from some Other, to whom we mistakenly ascribe the autonomy lacking in ourselves… The perceived desire of the Other confers prestige on the object, rendering it desirable. For this reason, desire is usually less about its purported object than about the Other; it is always “metaphysical,” in that it is less about having, than being.

Stay with me here. The purported object, in this case, is the movie, and the critic is the Other. By asking us to picture him discussing Last Year at Marienbad while sipping his coffee, Ebert is inviting us not so much to contemplate the movie, but to imagine what it’s like to be him, to be so smart as to actually understand this utterly cryptic work. It’s not so much that the movie itself is desirable; the review is about being the kind of moviegoer that can appreciate such a fine, subtle, highly sophisticated film. (It doesn’t matter that Ebert may be making fun of himself, just a bit, in his review … it’s still a fawning endorsement of a bullshit movie.)

Audiences who go in for these highly praised but inscrutable films are sharing in the illusion that there’s something to “get,” if only you’re smart enough. Believing that they “got” the movie is a matter of cognitive dissonance: I must have liked it, because it’s such an amazing film for those alive to its brilliance. Once this self delusion is built, it’s hard to tear down. Even when someone cries bullshit and says, “That movie was lame, I was totally lost” these fans just feel extra smug and elite, stroking their goatees (or bare chins because in the moment they forget they don’t actually have goatees), looking down on the naysayer, lost in their metaphysical identification with supreme intellect.

(This isn’t to say I’m a lowbrow cretin who only enjoys dippy comedies or action movies. As detailed here, I think my highbrow credentials are in pretty good order.)

Mick LaSalle, the San Francisco Chronicle movie critic, who has been at it since 1985, strikes me as pretty reliable. In a recent column he put forth a very useful idea: “With a bad story, the best you can hope for is a movie that’s bad in such an original way that critics, for a time, will insist it’s great. Like Last Year at Marienbad.”

Look, I don’t mind if I end up being underwhelmed by a lowbrow comedy like Wet Hot American Summer, even if Rolling Stone called it the 38th funniest movie of the 21st century. If I choose to ignore the 42 Metascore, well, caveat emptor. But when 26 different critics give a movie like There Will Be Blood a perfect 100, and the Metascore is 93, and I find the movie a bit tedious and its ending unforgivably ill-considered and poorly executed, erasing any meaning that could have been built up over the previous 2 hours and 38 minutes, I get a little pissed. So I’ve selected five highbrow movies with absurdly generous reviews and will walk you through exactly how they go wrong, and how we go wrong watching them. (Note: I have not actually watched Wet Hot American Summer.)

Warning: my commentary is chock full of spoilers. Because you absolutely should not watch any of these awful movies, in my opinion there’s nothing really to spoil.

Under the Skin (2014) – 80 Metascore

This highly artsy sci-fi movie features Scarlett Johansson as some kind of space alien who goes around seducing men and luring them to her weird lair where they sink down into some subterranean liquid and dissolve. She has some kind of supervisor who drives a motorcycle. Eventually she goes rogue and tries to have actual sex, which doesn’t work out so well, and eventually some asshole lights her on fire. It sounds more exciting than it is. Actually, it was godawful slow. Fortunately, we were streaming it online so we were able to speed it up … first to 1.25 times the normal speed, then 1.5, and finally all the way up to twice the normal speed and its pace was still glacial. The official runtime of the movie is 1 hour 48 minutes, but even with the second half sped up it felt like well over two hours.

And yet, a dozen critics gave this movie a perfect score of 100. For example, Donald Clarke of the Irish Times raved about it. Did he literally call it perfect? Well, no, and his review does allude to “occasional outbreaks of ambiguity” and allows that “the chain of command between the alien and her biker superiors is a little unclear.” Uh, yeah. The biker had nothing to do with anything else in the movie, we just got a lot of footage of some guy driving around on a motorcycle and occasionally dismounting and walking around. Calhoun goes on to say, “The drift of the plot is, however, always easy to grasp.” Well, duh … because the same damn thing happens over and over again, the repetition being utterly senseless and frankly cruel. Clarke concludes, “Under the Skin manages to foster empathy with an entity as isolated from human experience as an avalanche or a weather system. Such achievements tend to allow films to be classed as masterpieces.” Okay, first of all, if he admires empathy, why does he have none for the innocent people he’s recommending this terrible movie to? And second of all, “tend to allow films to be classed”? WTF? How does an achievement “allow” anything? Who taught this guy how to write a sentence?

I suppose I could sequentially rip apart every rave review of Under the Skin, but there’s a more important problem to address: Metacritic claims that Anthony Lane, of The New Yorker, who happens to be my favorite critic, also gave it a perfect 100. Naturally, I was skeptical. Not all (or even most) critics give movies a numerical rating, and I’ve seen before how Metacritic will sometimes assign a really high score to an only somewhat positive review. So I immediately clicked the link to the full review. My discovery? Anthony Lane didn’t even review this movie! The New Yorker review is from Richard Brody, and could not possibly be given a score of 100. Brody writes, “The conceit … offers immense promise,” but goes on to say:

It’s not a vision or even an idea, it’s a premise, and one that’s left completely undeveloped. Glazer evokes the idea of strangeness without actually seeing much, showing much, or revealing much. That job goes to the insistent music, which forces a stereotypical eeriness, as in the scores of fifties sci-fi B-movies, but without the hysterical exaggeration—without the fun.

He praises Johansson’s acting, but declares that her 2007 movie The Nanny Diaries “is a much better movie than Under the Skin.” The Nanny Diaries has a Metascore of 46, with New Yorker giving it, by Metacritic’s reckoning, a mere 40 points. So much for trusting Metacritic on this one.

(Note that Anthony Lane has written about Under the Skin, within a profile of Scarlett Johansson. He’s clearly smitten with her and does praise the movie, but it wasn’t a review per se and shouldn’t earn the movie 100 points.)

Now, I wouldn’t ask you to ignore all these 100-point reviews just because I hated this movie. Many real critics also butchered it. Rex Reed, in The Observer, praises Johansson’s sex appeal, skin, and smile, but laments her “stunning ignorance about how to choose the right roles.” Mick LaSalle, in the San Francisco Chronicle, gets right to the heart of the problem: “Under the Skin can be confused for a movie that hides its meanings, when it’s really a movie that hides its meaninglessness.” He calls BS on the high-minded ambition of the movie and decries its boring repetition:

So this is no normal woman. This isn’t even a normal homicidal maniac. This is someone on some kind of supernatural harvesting project. This is clear from the very first minutes, and the movie never advances beyond that. Instead virtually the entire action of the film just repeats the same kind of event - she goes out, looks for a man, etc. As one might imagine, this becomes quite dull, even sleep-inducing, especially considering the movie’s overall cast of slow-moving gloom.

Metacritic assigns a rating of 50 points (out of 100) to LaSalle’s review, which I think is really, really generous. My wife and I hated this movie. We should have just shut it off, but when a movie has such a high Metascore, we have sometimes fallen prey to the “sunk cost” fallacy … thinking we should give a movie the chance to redeem itself. As agonizingly slow as the movie was (even when sped up), we just kept watching, until we finally finished and were utterly disappointed—not just in the movie, but in ourselves for having faith in it.

So, there are two lessons to be gleaned here. First, don’t always trust the Metascore. Second, fail fast … if a movie sucks after 30 or 45 minutes, it’s mostly likely going to suck all the way to the final credits, no matter how many critics fawned over it.

To be continued…

Well, I’ve clearly run out of space here, or at least you’ve run out of time or patience for now. Check back in a week, for Part II: the next four movies to avoid, the ten critics you should ban for life, and the twenty best movies I’ve seen lately.

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Beck’st Spotlight - What Beer Goes Best With “Remains of the Day”?

Introduction

Every once in a while, a Beck’st comes along that is so monumental, it deserves its own blog post. This is one of those times.

What? You haven’t heard of Beck’sting? What rock have you been sheltering-in-place under? Well, click here for my original Beck’sting post, which will tell you all you need to know about this global phenomenon.

A Beck’st isn’t just a photo, but a photo with a caption or other gloss, along with the dialogue a good beer snapshot inevitably elicits. I’ve included those, along with the initials of all involved. Where you see one letter only (e.g., “E—”) that’s somebody’s spouse, kid, or another friend.

A little background

Back in 1994, my wife and I did a cross-country bicycle tour. Along the way, we stayed for a couple of days with my friend DW and his wife down in Ventura. It was a great visit, the highlights being a) getting a gun pulled on us, and b) watching The Remains of the Day in the theater. Having a gun pointed at me was pretty exciting, but the movie bored the crap out of me. I sat there thinking, “When is this gonna end? And how can Anthony Hopkins’ character be so annoying and useless?” Frankly, I’d have bailed early, but I knew DW had really been looking forward to the movie. (Did I say “movie”? I meant “film.”)

So, we left, when it finally ended, and when DW asked how I’d liked it, I decided I had to come clean. I admitted I’d been less than gripped by it. So had E—, my wife. DW’s reply was something like, “Thank God! I was bored out of my skull. I totally would have walked out, but I assumed you and E— were enjoying it!” The Remains of the Day has been a running joke ever since.

Remains of the Beck’st

DA: E— and I decided that it’s not enough to watch The Remains of the Day on demand via streaming platforms, even if that’s how all the cool kids do it. For a movie of this exalted intellectual caliber, we need a physical copy, just in case the Russians take down our Internet. I can’t wait to watch it again tonight. We might even watch it twice tonight!

P.S. Yes, the stemware is to add insult to injury.

JL: I for one appreciate your dedication to the old and trusted, even if the new is more “convenient”! But my main reaction to this photo was the absolute certainty that that beer would taste so much better straight outta the can than in that silly glass! Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go and stream “Sense and Sensibility” on my iPhone via Netflix for the 172nd time.

DA: You’re probably right about the beer tasting better right out of the can, but the inconvenience of pouring it gently into the stemware glass without generating too much foam, and the added nuisance of having to hand-wash the glass later (since the dishwasher would over time damage the Duvel logo) together became irresistible.

DW: I love the graphics of the can. Loads of irony going on here. I am amused by how they are putting the slogan “Mas Intensa” on a session IPA. “More Intense” is not how I would describe a session IPA. Maybe it’s more intense than a Corona? The other irony that just kills me, is that you have a VHS tape of Remains of the Day in your household and, not only that, it clearly states “Be Kind and Please Rewind.” So you must have purposely forgotten to return it to the Blockbuster or other neighborhood movie rental store, paid the fines, or timed it perfectly when you knew the store was going out of business, so you could keep a copy of this great movie to show your kids and rekindle the past. I am impressed. I once read that Lady Gaga frequently watches Remains when she needs to tap into her creative stream. Well done, DA.

DA: You’re so spot-on about the can. It’s pure nonsense, really. There was nothing intense about that IPA (except the price, E— having purchased it at some chichi Spanish delicacy boutique). It’s the weakest IPA I’ve ever had, both in flavor and ABU (at a mere 4.5%, it makes even the watery lagers seem powerful). On top of all that, it’s not even 12 ounces! It’s 11.2, that being the American-market labeling equivalent of a third of a liter. Why didn’t they do a half a liter, which would be just over a pint? Because they hate us. They’re downright un-American!

We did end up watching Remains of the Day, over two nights. It was a special treat for this convenience-averse viewer because we hadn’t used our VCR in so long, the batteries in the remote had corroded, destroying the electrical contacts. I tried to fix it with aluminum foil, and though I was unsuccessful, the process was very engaging and absorbing, almost as much as Remains itself. As for the movie, all I can say is that the wisdom of age has made me ever more receptive to its subtle charms. Repeated viewing affords the cinephile the opportunity to imagine himself as the auteur, making subtle changes to actually enhance the film, or at least bring it into closer alignment with a modern audience. 

For instance, consider the big scene where Lord Darlington, the English gentlemen of the estate (and of course Anthony Hopkins’s boss), has gathered the heads of state of western Europe together with a German delegate and is convincing them to adopt the appeasement strategy as their response to the Nazi regime. Christopher Reeve, the American delegate (and tycoon) gets up and gives a speech about how the people there are all perfect gentlemen but as politicians they are all amateurs and should leave this up to the professionals. A stirring speech, to be sure, which had me thinking to myself, “Amer’ca!” but then of course all the Brits and the craven Frenchmen et al totally disagreed, and in their very proper and gentlemanly way they basically kicked Reeve to the curb (or “kerb” as they’d have spelled it). As a viewer, and as an American—born American—I couldn’t really handle this scene. Of course great cinema is supposed to be unsettling, but still, this was a bit much to take. So I think a slight rewrite of this scene could have improved the movie, particularly for the patriots in the audience. Instead of clearing his throat and sitting back down, Reeve could have said, “You know, we’re just not going to accept that answer.” Darlington, being perplexed since Reeve was the lone American in the giant banquet hall, would say, “Excuse me, but ... what do you mean, we?” To which Reeve would slyly reply, “Me ... and Smith & Wesson!” Then he’d pull out his 44 Magnum [or 1930s equivalent) and escalate the peace process, if you catch my drift.

But of course the whole Nazi appeasement angle was just a side show, the real “action” being the fraught, eternally nascent relationship between Hopkins and Emma Thompson, the besotted housekeeper. There’s that utterly gripping and engrossing scene in Hopkins’ private study where he’s reading a book and takes pains to hide it when she arrives, and—perhaps because she’s besotted not only by Hopkins but by a few proper British 20-ounce pints of Mahou Màs Intensa Session IPA, or the 1930s equivalent (we don’t know what because the drinking occurs off-screen)—she pursues him about it, literally backing him into a corner, relentlessly repeating her inquiry as to the book, and then literally prying it from his fingers to discover that it’s just a banal, prosaic romance novel by some lowbrow hack (perhaps whatever that period’s equivalent would have been to Kazuo Ishiguro). Hopkins is flummoxed and embarrassed and assures Thompson that he only reads it to improve his vocabulary. She doesn’t buy this for a second and a charmed smile flits over her face as she recognizes this softer side of the starchy, staunchly professional head butler. It’s a very moving scene, but frankly I found it a bit too intense, even after repeated viewings. I know I should be stronger than that, and after all I knew what I was signing up for with this film, but still, it’s just so wrenching, like the emotional equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting if rendered in dialogue, and I really think a touch of levity would do so much to bring the viewer back from the edge. So in my version the book would turn out to be pure smut, the 1930s British version of Penthouse Forum, so that we in the audience could have a good laugh. And Hopkins could say, “I only read this to improve my understanding of the coarse vernacular of the lower servants, so that next time the under-butler or a footman uses a phrase like ‘one-eyed trouser snake’ or ‘I came Lake Superior [or whatever large English lake would fit here], I should know to what he is referring.” Thompson could grin lustily and say, “I know better, you dog!” Then she’d stick her tongue in his ear, and Hopkins would finally get out of his comfort zone, gratifyingly arriving in ours.

When I woke up this morning, my first thought was, “I can’t wait until this weekend day is over so it’ll be evening time, and we can watch Remains again.” I even toyed with watching it as a matinee, but of course any sophisticated viewer of a fine film like this knows the viewing properly begins in the gloaming, so that when the movie has been fully savored it’s bedtime. But then I realized this movie was becoming an obsession. These are intense times for me, with COVID-19, my broken collarbone, an impending election, and several more Mahou Màs Intensa Session IPAs still in the fridge. I think I need to give my poor psyche some respite, and shelve Remains for a while. But I know myself too well ... owning that film on VHS is just too strong a temptation. I would be putting that tape back in right after dinner, telling myself I’m only going to watch the first five or ten minutes but knowing full well I’d be in for the full two-hour-plus journey. Cold turkey is the best way. So today, we’re going to take the videocassette out to one of those little “Free Library” community book boxes and leave it for some other lucky person to stumble across.

Will I be rewinding the tape? No! As you probably already know, “Be Kind - Please Rewind” is a ruse perpetrated by the Videocassette Industrial Complex to give video rental outfits an excuse to fine you for not rewinding. All VHS aficionados know that the tape is in a vulnerable state—much like anyone who has just viewed Remains—right after it is played, due to the heat from passing through the player, and can actually be unduly stretched out if rewound right away. This surely accounts for why this copy of Remains, like all of them surely, has been so badly damaged from repeated, same-seating viewings that the audiovisual quality is severely diminished. The picture is as blurry as a pointillist painting and the sound as muddy as your spouse’s stern lecture when you’ve got a pillow over your head. Not that this is such a bad thing, though … I think I’m going to miss the soft-focus warmth of VHS when I digitally stream The Age of Innocence this evening.

Additional reading

For more Beck’sts, click here or here, and if you’re looking for the Becks’ts that commemorate my late father, click here. For my most recent Beck’sting post, click here.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Robin Killed Off!

Introduction

What’s up with all these comic book movies? They’re coming out constantly. I had to sit through Thor recently, because my wife has a thing for Chris Hemsworth. (I went along because Thor also stars Natalie Portman.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, this movie was pretty much unwatchable. We fast-forwarded through all the non-Earth scenes, which was like three quarters of the movie, and were still bored out of our skulls.

Curious about how this comic book movie thing got going, I decided to check out the original Batman from 1989. This film, more so than the Superman from 1978, seemed to spawn all these others. Superman was kind of nerdy and clearly targeted at kids, whereas Batman was evidently trying to be hip—and something adults could watch.

So: was the 1989 Batman any good? No. It looked pretty good but my wife and I found it really tedious. Clearly the movie industry is on to something, though, because these movies are undeniably popular. Batman was skillfully marketed and pulled in more than $40 million in its first weekend (vs. the mere $7.5 million that Superman made). Since Batman, there have been 20 movies based on DC comics and 47 movies based on Marvel comics. Maybe some of these are pretty good, but I think the bigger point is the crossover appeal: they draw in current teenagers for the obvious reasons, but also appeal to people my age who dug the comic books as kids and are prone to nostalgia.

As uninterested as I am in comic book movies, I was crazy about Batman as a kid. Watching the Batman movie awoke a dim memory I had of writing an essay about the Dynamic Duo some thirty years ago. And look, here it is now!

Robin Killed Off – October 29, 1988

When I was a little tyke, four or five years old, my life revolved around cowboys. Not real cowboys, who spend all day herding cows across the desert on a long drive, but the ones that spent all their time shooting at Indians or bad guys. The Lone Ranger was my favorite. I just thought it was so cool that he wore two belts, one to keep his pants up and the other for his gun holsters (or “holsterns” as I ignorantly called them). I had a Lone Ranger coloring book that showed him making his silver bullets, with the mold and everything. Too cool! Silver, the Lone Ranger’s white stallion (or “white-a-stallion,” in my benighted jargon) was just the most magnificent beast on the face of the earth.

I wore a cowboy hat for about two years straight. Nobody ever saw my hair during that period. I even wore that hat in the bathtub. When my kindergarten teacher told me to take it off, I refused. She went and got the school principal, and when he tried to take it away from me, I bit him. Everyone in my family remembers that hat and my cowboy fixation, but might not remember what replaced my “cowboy days.”

It was Batman who took over my imagination after cowboys inevitably got stale. Batman was so noble and good, yet so rock-‘em-sock-‘em tough, that he was a natural replacement. He didn’t have a horse, but he had a really cool car, a cool boat, and of course the Bat Cave.

Besides being strong and bold and good, the Lone Ranger and Batman had something else in common: a sidekick. The Lone Ranger had Tonto, and Batman had Robin. This seems like a wise arrangement. Sure, the hero is the greatest and all, but it’s also nice to have someone to relate to. Perhaps by seeing ourselves in the sidekick, we get to admire the hero in another way: he’s kind of like a cool big brother. For the humble among us, it’s hard to imagine ourselves being truly heroic, but we could relate to at least tagging along and helping out here and there. It’s hard not to love the underdog who’s always doing his best and sometimes even saves the hero’s bacon.

So imagine my shock and chagrin today when I read the following headline on the front page of the “Calendar” section of the L.A. Times: “Holy Finale! Comics Hero Bites The Dust.” Accompanying the article was a graphic illustration of Batman carrying a charred, shredded, blood-oozing corpse, who apparently had been Robin. The caption read, “Batman carries tattered body of Robin, as Dynamic Duo is halved.”

What the hell?! Nobody is supposed to die in the comics, at least nobody good! The Lone Ranger never killed or even badly wounded an outlaw—he just gave him a lecture and put him in jail. On the Batman TV show I used to watch [the original colorized series from 1966], Batman never hurt anybody, and neither did Robin; they just worked the bad guys over for a while and then surrendered them to the authorities. It was just enough action to be exciting without being crude or traumatic. Even the bad guys weren’t that bad. I remember an episode where the Joker tied Batman and Robin to a buoy with a bomb connected to it. Before leaving them to their fate, the Joker—strumming a guitar—sang them a little farewell song (and then gave them ample opportunity to get away unscathed).

But here, plain as day, Robin was flat-out dead. And he didn’t died of pneumonia, either. I quote from the article: “Robin is killed off in next week’s issue of Batman comics, blown to bits—BAM!—by a bomb planted by Iran’s new ambassador to the United Nations, who turns out to be another of Batman’s old foes, the Joker.”

That’s disgusting! The picture in the comic is even more revolting! A fella doesn’t even see such carnage in rated R movies! Since when is this appropriate fodder for kids’ imaginations?

I’m reacting to more than just the age-old gripe against exposing kids to violent images. Consider this: the Dynamic Duo, for almost fifty years, have been more than just characters—they’re real heroes to these kids. Every time the Dynamic Duo was in a bind in one of those wacky TV episodes, I’d be on the edge of my seat, pulling with all my heart for the two, just like a grownup watching his home football team in the grips of a key drive. Have 7-year-olds really changed, to where they can take a hero’s death in stride?

But the most hideous aspect of this tragedy is that the Joker didn’t really kill Robin: the kids themselves did it. The article says, “According to a spokesman for D.C. Comics, which publishes Batman, Robin was killed off by readers by a vote of 5,343 to 5,271 because he was considered a ‘twerp’ and a ‘little brat.’” To me this looks like another triumph of a big kid over his annoying little brother. These modern too-cool kids seem to have stopped caring about the underdog. Where kids once humbly related to the lesser character, now they have no use for him.

Look, I know comic books mainly exist to entertain, but was there really anything wrong with a small dose of didacticism? Is it just hopelessly nerdy now to try to steer kids in any positive direction, like supporting an underdog? Is it more important to give them what they want—i.e., to let them vote on the fate of a character—than to tell them the story the creators want to tell? What’s next? Do readers get to vote on everything?

It’s not that I consider myself some societal watchdog, some sociological scold. More to the point, I guess I was always heartened at the very existence of a weaker character. I always knew I’d never be Batman, but could see myself as a possible Robin. I loved that a powerful, cool man like Batman could respect Robin for what he was, despite what he wasn’t. In other words, I am acutely aware that I’ve been cursed with all the traits that got the Boy Wonder killed. It seems now that anyone lacking a huge chest, fistfighting prowess, and outsized bravado is nothing more than a twerp. The Robins of the world don’t seem to have a chance anymore. When the next generation is voting to have Robin killed, I fear for society and I fear for myself.

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